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Photo provided by conference attendee

Several events for veterinary moms, like this one in 2023, grew out of friendships formed in the DVMoms Facebook group but were organized outside of the group. Some members say changes in the group's management have created obstacles for colleagues who want to encourage real life gatherings on their own.

For the past decade, veterinarians who are mothers have had a particular space online where they could talk about cases, ask for and give parenting advice, seek solace, complain, crack wise and build enduring friendships.

Known as DVMoms – Life in the Trenches, the Facebook group was started by two practitioner moms in 2016 to provide support and empathy for women struggling to balance work, life and motherhood in a profession that's majority female. The group has been described as "magical" and "a lifeline."

Now, numerous former members say the group is morphing into something else — something that seems less about building community and more about profit for a few individuals.

During the past year and a half, they claim, the group's administrators have repeatedly violated the community's own rules and ethos: A promotional post that appeared to flout a no-advertising rule. The appearance of a digital strategist who was neither a veterinarian nor a mother. Trademarking of veterinary-mom-related terms with no warning. Silencing of questions and ousting of some who dared to ask.

Monetizing Facebook groups is not unusual. It can take many forms, from member fees and online stores to allowing advertising or promoting products sold by the admins themselves. It's generally understood that admins, as they're called, engage in some monetization to pay themselves for the time they spend managing a large group.

But critics of DVMoms' leadership say what's happening goes beyond simply seeking fair compensation for work, something they wouldn't begrudge. They complain that the admins operate surreptitiously to pursue goals that harm the group's integrity.

When critics raised concerns in the group, they said, the admins did not respond or replied evasively. Further, they said, the admins deleted posts, comments and questions. As of late last year, according to one member, each post had to be approved by an admin, and some posts were never published. Several members who raised concerns said they were booted from the group without being told why.

A former member who'd been around since the group's first weeks summarized her experiences and frustrations in an email to the VIN News Service this way: "It sounds like silly high school girl drama when I type it out, but you just have to understand how life-affirming and just ... HELPFUL that group was for so many years. And then these women just dismantled all of it ... And for what? Money? That's the conclusion we've all come to."

Another ex-member said that the group is "being sold as a 'product' " by the current leadership.

While Facebook groups are, in part, grassroots efforts driven by members, they are controlled by admins, who have broad discretion to moderate groups as they see fit. When admins take unpopular actions or ignore and delete complaints, members' main recourse is to leave.

Since early 2025, about a thousand members have quit or been removed from DVMoms – Life in the Trenches, according to members and former members. Defectors started another Facebook group in June that has grown to around 4,700 members.

That said, the DVMoms group hasn't come close to collapsing under the controversy. The group has nearly 20,400 members and logged 60 new posts yesterday, according to the "about this group" page. For scale, the total number of veterinarians in the United States is estimated to be somewhere between 86,400 and 133,500. VIN News was unable to determine the group's peak membership.

This story is based on interviews with and emails from 11 long-time current and former members located around the country, as well as public social media posts from others. VIN News granted requests for anonymity to sources who are former members who said they feared being maligned in the closed group without the opportunity to defend themselves or are current members who don't want to be expelled.

Over several months, VIN News made numerous attempts to reach Dr. Jordan Gesimondo and Dr. Jamie Perkins, principals in DVMoms LLC, a company affiliated with the group. Gesimondo is the only individual with a Facebook profile linked as an admin for the group.

Late last week, "DVMoms Team" responded with an email stating:

"DVMoms was founded to unite moms in veterinary medicine by fostering camaraderie, providing resources, and delivering innovative education. As we continue to grow, we remain committed to our mission. We are deeply grateful for the support of our partners, collaborators, and members, which makes it possible to invest in meaningful opportunities and resources for our community. In the process, we have made the decisions necessary to eliminate confusion and protect the integrity of our work so we can stay focused on what matters most: the elevation of our profession."

'We knew there were lots of us'

Dr. Megan Emerick had been in practice for only a few years when she had her first child. A recent veterinary school graduate, she had a lot to juggle. Her mother, a pediatrician, mentioned there was a "physician moms" group on Facebook and suggested her daughter find support in one for veterinarians.

Finding none, Emerick decided to start her own.

Gesimondo was a fellow associate of Emerick's at a practice group in Phoenix. She, too, was a new mother. Together, the doctors launched a Facebook group they named Moms with a DVM.

The co-founders began inviting former classmates and colleagues. They, in turn, invited their friends. "We knew there were lots of us," Emerick said. But she and Gesimondo had not anticipated it would become as popular as it did.

As the group grew, so did the role it played in members' lives.

"Part of the magic of the group was that it functioned as a nationwide network for moms who needed help," a current member told VIN News. "Time and again, members posted that they were stranded at an airport or had an adult child in distress in an unfamiliar town or were traveling and needed medication for their pets. Time and again, other members who had never met them came to their aid without hesitation. Members opened their homes to each other, loaned vehicles, provided safe places to land."

According to Emerick, she and Gesimondo were the admins and sole moderators in the early days. Initially, the group was public — accessible to anyone on Facebook — but as it became clear that members were posting about sensitive personal and work-related topics, they made it private. As with all private groups on the platform, those who wanted to join had to submit a request and be vetted. Soon, there was a backlog.

"It was amazing how fast it grew, and how much it really was such a supportive environment," Emerick said. "It was super helpful to have moms of different-age kids. Great to see people who had gone through the baby stage who said, 'This is how we managed.' "

Over time, rules were implemented. They included a call for mutual respect and bans on political discussions, advertising and sharing screenshots from the page with people outside of the group. Violating that last rule could get you kicked out.

In 2018, Emerick raised the idea of forming a corporation. "I felt a group of this size and level of involvement had the potential to help shape the profession in a positive way for women and parents," she recounted, "and to do that, I felt like it needed to be more organized." She explained to members that a company could do things like create a continuing education conference that offered childcare, a rarity at the time and still not standard.

The idea led to the establishment of DVMoms LLC. The Facebook group name was changed at the same time to DVMoms — Life in the Trenches.

Emerick, Gesimondo and a third group member who had joined the admin team, Dr. Kim Bishop, were principals of the company, according to articles of incorporation filed in Arizona in 2018. Other members were brought on to moderate the Facebook group.

After a time, Emerick recalled, she felt left out of decisions related to the company's finances. She stepped down in 2019 over those concerns and because of developments in her own life. She told VIN News recently that she didn't feel like she could lead DVMoms going forward.

Emerick agreed to talk about the early days of the group but did not want to weigh in on recent developments because she hasn't followed the group for years and is no longer a member.

As of yesterday, the listed members of the admin team are Bishop, Gesimondo and Dr. Stephanie Strunk Hickey.

However, Hickey said by email that she's never been an admin but was an unpaid moderator for eight years until she left the group in 2025. Bishop said by email that she was removed as an admin on Oct. 31, though she remains a member of the group.

In addition, Bishop said, she resigned from her role at DVMoms LLC on Nov. 5 and received acceptance of her resignation on Nov. 14. She did not explain why she resigned.

Perkins became a principal in DVMoms LLC in May 2024, according to company filings. She previously worked for Viticus Group (formerly the Western Veterinary Conference) as a program director. In an interview with VIN News in late 2024 for a different article, Perkins identified herself as the chief medical officer of the Facebook group.

She is not listed as an admin for the group, but multiple members say she has operated as one.

'We didn't elect these women'

In one respect, the group's success was itself a source of discontent. Some long-time members said they regretted the loss of intimacy as it grew. Independent subgroups spun off organically to recapture some closeness. They were organized around geographic regions or special interests, such as baking, crocheting, gardening, keeping backyard poultry, books, animal breeds, Taylor Swift or by children's stage of life. Many subgroups had "DVMoms" as part of their name.

It was in connection with the subgroups that some members said they first experienced a sense of top-down management from the DVMoms' leadership that didn't sit right.

A little more than a year ago, one subgroup admin said, she got a request from a main group admin saying that she would need to be added to the subgroup as an additional admin or the subgroup could not continue to use "DVMoms" in its name. The company had trademarked the term in 2022.

According to several sources, this occurred in many of the subgroups. Some were encouraged to add DVMoms to their name if they hadn't already.

A DVMoms admin described the requests as an effort to "elevate and recognize subgroup admins" and allow the main group admins to "spotlight" groups and "drive" interested traffic to them, according to a screenshot of a direct message exchange shared with VIN News.

(Sources who provided screenshots of posts, comments and direct-message exchanges in violation of the group's rules said they did so intentionally to bring to light what they considered to be the admins' negative activities.)

When the subgroup admin pushed back on the request and asked why the new direction, she said she was told that leadership "just wanted to organize the groups because the moms were finally 'getting a seat at the table.' "

She was flabbergasted.

The response, she said, sounded like something from a professional trade group, like a veterinary medical association, not an informal support group among peers. "We didn't elect these women to speak for us 'at the table,' " she said. "It just completely grossed me out."

A long-time member in Arizona said subgroup admins were told the move was to protect them. She didn't buy it. "We believe this was a scare tactic," she said by email, "to coerce the subgroups to adopt the DVMoms name so it looked like there were more members than there really were" in the main group.

'My question never got posted'

Last summer and fall, a series of posts and communications alienated more members. In June, the admins posted about The Farmer's Dog, a pet food brand. The post (a screenshot of which was shared with VIN News) asked questions such as, "Have you seen their clinical options? What have you tried, and how did it go?"

It struck some members as marketing masquerading as an innocent inquiry.

"People started asking questions about [whether] sponsors were being allowed in the group [and] what information they were trying to gather," a former member from North Carolina said. Criticism and questions were deleted. Then, the whole post was taken down.

Next, a profile for a man who was a digital strategist, not a veterinarian, showed up in the group. After his presence was flagged by members, he was removed.

A few days later, the man in question, Eric Garcia, posted to his own Facebook page that he'd been hired by DVMoms to build a website and community forum for the group. "By mistake, I was added to the group," he wrote on Oct. 31, "which, as you can imagine, caught me and a few friends in the group off guard." He said it was an "admin error" that was corrected "right away."

The explanation did not mollify everyone. Some wondered why there was a need for a website and a "community forum." Others expressed doubt that it had been an accident.

A few months later, several members said they received an email from Perkins that had been sent to the DVMoms LLC listserv. The email, a copy of which was shared with VIN News, advertised a team-building card game focused on veterinary medicine. In the message, Perkins identified herself as the founder of NotWNL, a nonprofit that had apparently produced the card game.

A former member said in a post on her own Facebook page in December that when she received the promotion, she drafted a post to the group, asking, "Real question — how did this spam email for personal gain get sent out to a list serve that was built for DVMoms?"

She recounted, "My question never got posted — it was deleted before it ever got published."

Then, she was kicked out of the group and blocked. "This is censorship at its very worst," she wrote. "I joined a group of like-minded adults who are moms and are veterinarians, and not only am I not allowed to ask a very basic question, but I've been shunned because of it."

Another veterinarian echoed the complaint. She said that "extreme censorship" leaves members who don't participate often — which is the majority — in the dark about questionable behavior by those who manage the group.

The group's overall tone was changing, according to critics. "There was a level of inherent trust that doesn't exist in most online communities," a member said. "Over the past two years, that trust was eroded and now doesn't exist anymore."

'The mission had changed'

For many disaffected members, it was an offline action by group and company leaders that was most outrageous.

Through back-channel conversations, members learned last fall that DVMoms LLC had applied in January 2025 to register trademarks for "Moms with a DVM," the original but retired name of the group, and "Vet Moms."

Trademark registration is a standard business practice. DVMoms had been trademarked for years without member protest. Complaints about the new trademarks centered on lack of transparency about the move and its effect on independent events. Critics said the new trademarks were attempts to control marketing and sponsorship opportunities in the "veterinary mom" space. Vet Moms and Moms with a DVM have been used by various members to promote events since at least 2017, members said.

"These are just the way we describe ourselves," a former member said. Others told VIN News that it seemed particularly egregious to trademark the generic term "vet moms," which might also apply to moms who are veterans or moms of veterans.

In its early years, DVMoms' leadership supported independent events and allowed them to be promoted in the group. After DVMoms began offering its own conference, the admins moved away from collaborating with and supporting others' efforts.

According to organizers of and participants in other conferences, posts about continuing education opportunities outside the DVMoms' umbrella were no longer allowed. Organizers were alerted that use of the trademarked terms was off-limits, regardless of their historical use.

"The moms freaked out," a former member said about the revelation. "No one knew that the mission had changed, and monetization was the plan."

Another long-time member said the admins could have avoided alienating members by transparently communicating the need for funding. "They could have requested a member fee," she said. "They could have said, 'We'll be an organization, and we'll vote on a board.' They would have had the support of the group."

Those with knowledge of sponsorships said trademarking terms enabled DVMoms to appear to be the foremost veterinary mom event, which could make it more attractive to corporate sponsors.

In a post responding to the trademark uproar, a DVMoms admin said the terms had been trademarked because similar names had been used in ways that created confusion about what was connected to the group.

The statement said: "We love collaborating with others who support veterinary families. When our name or identity is involved, we simply ask to be included in the planning so everything stays aligned with the values of our community, and we can ensure that any financial, educational or social benefits flow back to our members."

Current and former members say they aren't aware of any financial benefits flowing back to the group. How much has been raised and spent by DVMoms LLC hasn't been shared with the group, according to members. As a private, for-profit company, it has no obligation to disclose its accounting.